New $10 Off Coupon for March 2012

Creative Uses of Used Cardboard Boxes

Sometimes there are life events, such as moving, that make us use a lot of cardboard boxes at a time. Sometimes, we're just piling up these boxes simply because we get them every time we purchase something that needs to hold and protect the item. Then there will be times when we wonder what we should do with all the piling cardboard boxes. Apart from the obvious to use these used boxes as containers of miscellaneous things, let's check out some of these cool, super creative uses of used cardboard boxes that people have done.

Stylish Cardboard Coffee Table

Made by Thato Riet
Source: here

Cardboard Box Forts

Children will love this one!

Source: Green Prophet

Cardboard Box Halloween Costume

Source: last mariner

Cardboard Bike
Source: http://quickrelease.tv/?p=505

Cardboard Shoes

Made by Mark O'Brien

Source: Junk Culture

Cardboard Gift Boxes and Holders

Source: http://www.cutoutandkeep.net/projects/creative-gift-boxes-and-holders

Cardboard Guitars
DIY cute cardboard guitars; see instruction here.

Cardboard Furniture

This house is really packed with cardboard furniture.

Big Cardboard "Boat"

Are you impressed already? Can you think of something to make out of used cardboard boxes? Share with us here.

Battery Recycling

Do you know what else contains mercury and/or other toxic metals besides fluorescent lamps? Batteries. All types of batteries, including lead-acid batteries, silver oxide batteries or alkaline batteries contain hazardous metals, which if mixed with the household wastes, can endanger the environment as well as our health. The good news is most of these batteries can be recycled. It only takes a small effort to do that – simply by collecting them in a box or container and drop them off in the battery recycling collection center. It’s too easy that it gives us no reason for not participating in battery recycling.

Image by Evelyn Giggles

Lead-acid batteries, including car batteries and UPS batteries, contain toxic elemental lead that needs to be kept away from any water source. Fortunately lead-acid battery recycling has been done for a while now. In fact, about 90 percent of lead-acid batteries in the United States are recycled.

Silver oxide batteries contain mercury in small amount. However, no matter how small it is, it’s essential to recycle these batteries so that the mercury inside can be retreated and recovered.

Rechargeable batteries contain lead and cadmium and other materials that need to stay away from the landfill. However, although these substances are dangerous when they come in contact with human consumption, they’re quite valuable and can be reused in the next production. Therefore, these rechargeables must be recycled at the end of their lives.

How do we recycle batteries?

For North America regions, including the United States and Canada, Call2Recycle is the only free battery recycling company that you can contact. The company provides free collection kits and free shipping for the dead batteries you collect. Or you can simply drop off the batteries to one of their collection sites. Then they will recover the dead batteries from you and turn them into new useful things such as new batteries and stainless steel merchandises.

So how do you treat your dead batteries? If your answer is to throw it away along with the other wastes, you’ll need to change the habit now that you have read this article. Save the environment, save the children and save yourselves from the negative effects that improperly disposed batteries can cause by joining this battery recycling program. It doesn’t cost a thing and everyone can do it. Let’s do that!

Lamp Recycling: Why and How We Should Do It

One of the things that the act of recycling addresses is the lamp recycling. Especially when it concerns the lamps that contain mercury – no matter how small it is in these lamps (less than 4 mg) – it is very important to separate the lamp wastes from the other household/industry wastes. Read on and you’ll find out why lamp recycling is essential to protect our health and how we can recycle lamps properly.

Why should we do lamp recycling?

The lamps meant here are the mercury-containing lamps. These include the Fluorescent, Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFL), and High Intensity Discharge Lamps. There is only a very small amount of mercury inside these light sources, and it’s even smaller when they’re at the end of their lives, but even the smallest amount of mercury when disposed improperly could endanger human’s health. That’s why we have to separate these mercury containing lights and send them off to the lamp recycling centers.

How is Mercury dangerous for our health?

Mercury is identified with Hg symbol. It is a heavy silvery metal which becomes liquid at room temperature. Exposure to mercury can cause a man to experience health problems, from the light to the more acute ones. When a body is contaminated with mercury, some stay in the kidney while some others travel throughout the body. It may be in one’s blood, brain, bones, liver, etc. As this exposure gets intense, the body can experience irritability, hallucinations, insomnia, brain damages, and many more.

How do we properly recycle lamps?

Simple. Don’t throw away broken lamps together with the other wastes. Keep them in a separate container until it’s time for you to transfer the container of these lamps to the recycling center. A good idea is to use fiber drums, made especially for containing fluorescent lamps for recycling purposes. These recycled drums are reusable, environmentally friendly, cost effective, moisture resistant, and most importantly they are an important tool towards the better, healthier environment. Contain your broken fluorescent in these drums and take them to the recycling center to further process the mercury.

Sending mercury containing lamps to the recycling center recovers 99.98 percent of the mercury in the lamp. This way you can reduce your electricity bill by using energy-saving fluorescent lamps while still act responsibly as the lamps come to the end of their lives.

President's Day SALE 2012

This year's President's Day is on 20 January 2012. Celebrate it with BayTec Containers and save 10% off for ANY items!!!

This sale is only valid for 4 days; from February 17-20, 2012!

Online order: type in the Coupon Code: PRESIDENT in the "Coupon box"
 on the check out page.

Phone order: Call in on Monday, February 20, 2012, and tell our Representative that you're ordering with the Coupon Code: PRESIDENT.

Inventory Management Ensures Well-Organized Office

There are many aspects to organization when it comes to large scale, non-household business. At a warehouse, a factory or an office, good organization is a must. Since there are more items to take care of, inventory management comes in handy to ensure a well-organized workplace. Once you do the inventory management, you’ll see how you’ll save so much time locating which is where, what needs to be fixed and which is ready for distribution. You’ll have less chance of losing items, too. Does your business need inventory management? Most likely. Read on to know its benefits and how to do it.

Inventory management benefits

There are many good things that one can benefit from applying inventory management. One obvious advantage is how it saves time and ensures readiness when a specific item is ordered. By using inventory tags and inventory labels, a company can minimize the possibilities of missing items, broken items unattended and it can also detect the status of each item whether it’s passed the quality control stage, ready for sales and distribution, etc. It is also easier to locate items and to address problems, if any, at the earliest chance.

As the inventory management is done effectively, it is hoped that sales targets are met and thus the company can generate more profits.

How to use inventory labels and tags for inventory management

It’s really simple. The trick is you’ll just need the labels and the consistency of keeping updates of the status of each item. The inventory tags and labels include information such as: Rejected By, Accepted By, Inspected By, or warnings like Hot Inventory. You may customize these labels by adding the logo of your brand and contact information. Or you may simply buy ready-made tags like what we offer here.

Using inventory labels and tags increases the effectiveness of inventory management. If done right and consistently, it’ll make a better, organized working environment that could lead to client satisfaction and increased income. For best practice, use these inventory labels with AkroBins or Storage Cabinets. Start organizing your office inventory more conveniently now!

Video of the Week: Recycled Hanging Bottle Garden

This is a fantastic idea to reuse water plastic bottles. Instead of sending them to the landfill and let them wait for hundreds of years to degrade, reusing these bottles into hanging bottle garden gives them a second life and gives you a great, fresh vegetable harvest in the end; even when you don't have that garden space in your house/apartment.

Organize in Style with Vittles Vault with Covers

By now you must have known how versatile the role of buckets as containers. From organizing holiday decorations, making your own recycling bins, doing earthbox gardening to making homemade beer, pails – both new and used – will always be useful wherever you are. However, sometimes you wish you could use a little more beautification with your pails. This is where the Vittles Vault comes in handy.

Remember the amazing Gamma Seal lids? Remember how they seal containers ever so tightly that you can even stock food for emergency/for a long time without getting the worry that the food contents will go bad from seeping oxygen? Well, now the Gamma Seal lids come in style together with a 2 gallon faux leather or fur covered vault! So not only can you safely store food products – or other goods you want to organize really – but you can also keep these vaults in public places of your home or office as part of the house decoration.

The offered Gamma Seal Vittles Vault is 8 lb. in capacity. You may choose between the more manly (or neutral) black faux leather vittles vault and the more girly pink faux fur leather vittles vault. These are useful as a gift container to be used on Valentine ’s Day or any other memorable days like wedding anniversary, etc.

A very good practice of using the vaults is to show these containers to your kids and see how they like to organize their toys after a great playing session into these cute vittles vaults. Teaching organization at early age has a positive effect to any kid’s mentality in the future. Support this good intention with the gorgeous looking props – like these vittles vault – and you will already be in a good direction to go!

Want to start being organized in style? Do it with Vittles Vault with Gamma Seal covers!

Gift Holder

In addition to our blog post on recycled bottles, here is an interesting crafty video on how to make a gift holder using soda bottle. Smart, pretty, green and hardly costly.

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Tips to Turn Craft Making Hobby into Business

by Margarida Sardo

Do you enjoy making crafts? From quilt to sweater knitting to card making, all this could be turned into great business as more people start to appreciate homemade designs rather than massive factory production. You can see the evidence from the increasing number of craft blogs on the internet. Here are some tips if you are interested in trying out making a business out of your crafts.

Know your target audience

Will your crafts appeal to male, female, old, young, feminine, masculine, chic, posh, traditional, low-budget or high-end customers? You need to determine this from the very beginning. Not to limit the buyers, but to address their specific needs in your marketing tools later.

Decide an identity of your home-based company

An identity is important for a customer to spot the products they like. It includes logo of your company, catchy tagline, etc. If you start from zero with initial budget of less than $1000, you can try making these on your own or get a graphic designer friend who can do it for you not too expensively. Take your time to decide your vision and mission. Your logo and the rest of the company branding should be based on this initial idea.

Sell through different ways

There are many ways to sell your crafts. You can either get a website designer/programmer to design an online shop for you, but this will cost quite a lot. Cheaper way is to promote your goods through eBay, etsy, etc.

Use social media for marketing

It’s the era of internet! Everybody uses it. How many people do you know that don’t have blog, Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr? Marketing has never been easier. You can also reach more target audience than when you sell locally in a shop. Create a noise about your newborn business and get noticed.

Ship crafts with nice packaging

Packaging has a crucial role in selling products. The better packaging you have, the better the impression you make to the customers and the more chance you have return clients. Bay Tec has a lot of shipping boxes to offer. They are of different kinds, shapes and sizes made of different types of materials. See the complete list here to find what suit your products best. You still need to beautify the packaging boxes with nicely designed labels.

Choose a trusted mailing service

While you want to save on shipping cost, you still need to make sure that the mailing service is known for great safe deliveries. If the crafts you are making are breakable, ensure that you put enough padding inside the box and notify the postal service that the goods are fragile.

Selling crafts may not be the one thing that gets you easy regular money, but if you can be happy when making crafts AND make money in the end, it must be such a good way to live life, mustn’t it? Give it a try now and tell us how it goes!

Making a Green Home is Easy and Inexpensive

Today, there are still many people who think that having a green home takes a lot of effort, money and time. While it is true that the act of recycling plastic and turning it into something useful costs quite a lot of money, but that is really what the recycling curb or the city’s recycling program has to deal with. For a small-scale, environmentally friendly people like us, being green only starts at home; and that is truly an easy and inexpensive thing to do. Would you like to know how? Stay with us and read on.

Dedicate different rubbish bins for different wastes

You see, it’s only complicated when we pile all the same wastes into one bin, and later sort them into “recyclable wastes” and “non-recyclable ones.” If we just make different bins for different types of wastes and start throwing rubbish into its respective bin, then it’s not hard at all! It doesn’t take time other than providing the bins with specific colors and labels for different wastes.  If buying the ready-made bins costs too much for you, you can make your own recycle bins from cheap 5 gallon buckets.

Make your own compost from the organic wastes you collect

Why not? Not only will you save money on compost – if you like gardening – you will also eliminate the possibility that you have to find a city organic rubbish bin to throw away your organic wastes. See how you can make your own compost bin here.

Swap those toxic household cleaners with organic products

Always check the cleaning products you buy whether it contains toxic or not. Don't buy it if they do. You might not feel it when you use these products, but the environment will. The water you mix the products with will end up in the sewer, to the rivers and even in the grounds. This pollutes the habitat and living organisms. In the long run, we will get the negative result of this act. We may eat food produces that grow in polluted land or fishes from polluted water. Plant-based cleaning products are better to use.

Pack waste-free lunch for your kids and family

The more we throw away paper plates, plastic bags, disposable cutleries, and ready-pack drinks, the more we are being unkind to the environment. Did you know that to degrade all of those things above could take hundreds of years? Start packing a waste-free lunch for your family. Check out how here.

Use less bug sprays

Although sometimes it feels like you can’t help it because the insects are just so annoying, do something more permanent to keep the insects out. Seal all holes on the walls or put mosquito nets at the ventilated areas like windows or doors. This should help prevent the insects’ attacks and will require you to use less bug sprays, which in the long run could be harmful for your own health and the environment.

Save water, use rainwater barrels

Our previous blog post on saving water to reuse later is a good way to save water bills and reuse the caught water for watering the garden or flushing the toilet. Only by the help of 5 gallon pails and/or rain barrel, you can be good to yourself and to the environment.

Still think that having green home causes too much pain? It can’t be with those ideas above. If you have any other ideas to share, please do post a comment here.

Where to Put Plastic Storage Cabinets and for What Items?

Remember this plastic storage cabinet? You might wonder where you could place this useful thing at home or at the office. Here are some ideas where you could possibly mount the cabinet.

Over the toilet

Store small bathroom items in the drawers like cotton buds, spare toothbrushes, facial cream tubes, anything you can find in the bathroom which you don’t want to see lying around on the counter. This way, things in the bathroom are well-organized and easy to find.

In the closet as accessories storage

If you like collecting accessories (or your wife or daughter does) like earrings, rings, bracelets, necklaces, etc., the plastic storage cabinet can be a great solution for bedroom area. Simply put the accessories there, label them and mount them on a wall that is easy to reach.

In the garage

You need storage for those nails, screws and small screwdrivers! The plastic storage cabinet will make a great solution for those little things.

At the office

The drawer cabinet is the perfect place to store pens, mails, business cards and other office stuffs. Get one for your office and pool the mess into good storage where you can find all your little things easily.

How useful this plastic storage is! You can use it practically for anything in anywhere you like! If you ever get tired of all the mess at your place, be they keys, cell phone charger plugs, staplers, etc. you can always opt to get one of these plastic drawer storage cabinets!

Organizing Holiday Decorations in 5 Gallon Pails

We have so many different holidays every year. They are always celebrated merrily with nice decorations to brighten both public and private places. However, once the holidays are over, we are often left with cleaning up these so-many decorations. Some we need to throw away, but many can still be used for the next same holiday season. Rather than buying new decorations every year, why don’t we just keep them tidily until we use them again the next time? It’s also all very easy and cheap. All you need to have is 5 gallon pails in different colors. The following talks about organizing holiday decorations in 5 gallon pails.

Each holiday season is normally marked with specific color(s). For example, Christmas is associated with red and green, St. Patrick’s day green, Valentine’s day red and white and Halloween orange and black. For easy identification of these different holiday decorations, you can color code the 5 gallon buckets with these specific colors. Place the Christmas tree decorations in red and green pails labeled “Christmas.” St. Patrick’s decorations can be piled in this cute Camo green pail. The romantic pink, red and white candles or other Valentine’s Day crafts can go to the red and white buckets. The Halloween masks, centerpieces, bat garlands etc. can be stored in orange and black pails. If you celebrate any other holidays, feel free to code your buckets for each specific special day.

Whether it is Halloween, Christmas, Independence Day, etc., we can always try to get more organized towards the end of each celebration. The colorful 5 gallon buckets help a great deal in color-coordinate these holiday goods. It’s also a great idea to buy a package consisting of each colored bucket to save money.

So, are you up to holiday organization throughout the year? Inexpensive 5 gallon buckets are the answer to easy and cheap organization. Most importantly, no more throwing away reusable decorations, which means less money to spend the next holiday!

Related blog posts: 

• 2012 New Year’s Resolution: Get Better Organized with Colorful 5 Gallon Buckets
• Organize in Style with Vittles Vault with Covers

2012 New Year’s Resolution: Get Better Organized with Colorful 5 Gallon Buckets

It’s been a month since 2012 started. What is your resolution for this year? In case you haven’t set any, here’s a great New Year’s resolution idea: Get better organized with colorful 5 gallon buckets! It’s an extremely useful aim (organization) and it’s not hard to achieve, either. Read on to find out why and how.

Why do we want to be better organized?

Well, there are many reasons for it! One of the most important is it saves a lot of your precious time finding little things. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you needed to be ready for an important meeting in time, but came late anyway because you couldn’t find your presentation papers? Or you are in the middle of fixing your son’s bicycle but you couldn’t find the right screwdriver. It must have been in the garage, but by the look of it, it might take half an hour of your time just to find it. That’s how important organization is.

OKAY, so I want to get more organized this year. How can I start doing that without spending so much money?

Use cheap 5 gallon buckets. Bay Tec just reduced the already-affordable price of its 5 gallon pails to even cheaper one: only $3.78! Of course you can also utilize used pails, but the colorful buckets offer easier identification of stored items. Simply have one color for each different category; i.e. “stationary,” “letters and other documents,” etc. You can decide whether you want to start this organization for your office, your garage stuffs, or your kitchen ingredients. As long as you put labels or stickers and category information on the outer side of the buckets, you are already good to go.

Want to beautify the storage? Here are some free downloadable, printable labels for your buckets.

Click below for each label's link above:

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REMEMBER: You need to put back every little thing you take from each bucket so that you won't have to waste your time trying to find it the next time you need to use it. It doesn't take more than a minute to do so and you'll save 20-30 minutes in future use.